The German government has decided not to renew a contract with Verizon out of fear the telecom giant might be cooperating with the NSA and allowing the spy agency to snoop on private communication

The Unbearable Bureaucracy of Wikipedia

by Dariusz Jemielniak

Forget.me wants to make it easier to exercise your ‘right to be forgotten’ on Google

The Next Web by Paul Sawers

In the wake of the landmark EU ruling last month stipulating that individuals should have the right to be forgotten by removing outdated information about themselves from search engine results, Google was soon inundated with takedown requests

One Year After the Snowden Revelations: How the NSA Violates International Human Rights Standards

Global Voices Online

Cartoon by Carlos Latuff, shared via Web We Want/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Today, June 5, marks the first anniversary of the beginning of the Edward Snowden revelations—a landmark event in global awareness of the worldwide spying machine.

Over the last year, the world has learned specific details of how the NSA and its four closest allies in the Five Eyes partnership (United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand)have constructed a web of digital communications surveillance systems at the technical and operational levels spanning the entire globe. We have learned the details of the extent of cooperation and intelligence-sharing among these countries, and have witnessed how material gathered under one country’s surveillance regime is readily shared with others.

The dispersed locations of the Five Eyes countries enable them to surveil most of the world’s Internet traffic as it transits through their hubs and is stored in their various territories. Moreover, they have partnered with over 80 major global corporations to leverage their spying capabilities. The scope and reach of their cooperation and intelligence sharing has shocked the world.

In a leaked internal document, the NSA defined their “collection posture” as being to “sniff, know, collect, process, exploit, partner it all.” This proves what many privacy advocates had suspected for a long time: The NSA has strayed far from its legitimate goal of protecting national security. In fact, we have seen the NSA participate in economic espionage,diplomatic spying and suspicionless surveillance of entire populations. Even worse, it surreptitiously weakened the products and standards that many people use to protect themselves against online spying.

Julian Assange marks 2nd year in Ecuador’s embassy

Julian Assange is marking the second anniversary of his stay in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London

The anonymous Internet

Oxford Internet Institute –

Information Geographies on 9 June 2014 at 13:46PM

Description This cartogram illustrates users of Tor: one of the largest anonymous networks on the Internet. Data The data are freely and openly available on the Tor Metrics Portal, which

And The Movie File-Sharing Capital of The World Is….

TorrentFreak

It’s no secret that P2P file-sharing services are widely used to distribute pirated movies. However, less is known about the volume of these unauthorized transfers in various countries.